Bedrock - Part of your learning journey

Reading Bedrock is part of your professional learning journey. This issue features lectures and workshops from this year’s IEU Early Childhood Conference held in Sydney in September, as well as stories from Queensland, including a look at robotics in early childhood, and how early childhood teachers can combat obesity in children.

Bedrock counts towards the maintenance of accreditation for NSW readers. Professional reading can be included as part of your PD or PL for maintenance purposes.

As early childhood consultant Lisa Bryant points out on page 8, the accreditation process has allowed the NSW branch to quantify how many early childhood teachers there are in NSW: around 6000. Yet NSW has only 1200 early childhood IEU members.

The IEU has fought hard on behalf of its members to achieve professional accreditation for early childhood members in NSW and to ensure the standards and rules around accreditation are relevant to early childhood teachers.

It continues to fights for pay parity with school teachers for early childhood teachers.

In Queensland too, members in Crèche and Kindergarten Association (C&K) centres are fighting for wage parity in negotiations for a new collective agreement. C&K continues to refuse to accept the recent wage outcomes for teachers in the Queensland state and Catholic school sectors as a benchmark for its teachers.

A higher density of union membership in the sector in both NSW and Queensland can help facilitate these things.

Let your non union colleagues know about the benefits of union membership, and how its helps them industrially and professionally.